Peter Bromberg is the Director of the Salt Lake City Public Library System. His office resides in a stunning downtown location, with soaring views and spaces that inspire entry into a world of knowledge and exploration. Peter was encouraged by library leaders before him to participate in the 1998 Snowbird Library Leadership Institute in Utah, where he developed a great admiration for the Salt Lake City Public Library as the founding institution. When he was selected to take over the helm, he held deep appreciation for the institutional history of the Salt Lake Library. He leads in a way that gives people influence and the ability to change the world in which they operate. In 2017, Peter eliminated all library fines, based on the core values of the library profession for equitable access. This elimination of barriers-to-service increased the number of borrowers, card registrations, and checkouts – and earned positive feedback from both the staff and public.

As an EveryLibrary (http://everylibrary.org/) leader since 2012, he’s been helping libraries across the nation ensure stable funding through campaigns to win bonding and tax referendum. For Peter, strategic planning is really road-mapping that is responsive to rapid change; it takes people out of organizational boxes and puts them into something more like clouds with borders that overlap. He encourages staff to fulfill the needs of ‘customer journeys’ in which a request for a résumé book may be understood as the human desire for security and stability. He gets out of bed every day with an intention to enrich the lives of people and to bring out the potential of all human beings to learn, grow, and create a better world. Find yourself enriched by listening to Peter’s inspiring vision!

Full Transcript

This podcast is all about library leadership, what leaders
are doing in the field now, what up and coming leaders can look toward a vision
from people already doing the job. We just want to share some insights and
thoughts for libraries.

We’re here
today at the beautiful Salt Lake City Public Library with Executive Director
Peter Bromberg. Today’s show is going to highlight an initiative by Peter
Bromberg to get rid of all library fines, providing innovation and access to
patrons. You’re not going to want to miss this show. Peter thanks for being on
the show today. First of all, tell me a little bit about yourself and about
your organization.

Sure, well about me, I’ve been in the library biz for about
25 years in a variety of positions: public libraries; special libraries;
federal; team librarians – have worn a lot of different hats over the years. Moved
here to Salt Lake from New Jersey about three and a half years ago, love it
here. This job that I’m in now, as Director of the Salt Lake City Library is a
dream job, and perhaps we can get into a little bit of some of why that is, in
the conversation.

The organization itself – we serve the city of Salt Lake.
It’s about 190,000 people. We have a few hundred employees. I think our FT’s
about 190 now, budget of about $22,000,000 – eight locations. Our flagship
branch downtown is about 240,000 square feet. These are the things – I’m
thinking about the audience, might give them some context with these stats.
It’s an organization that’s 137 years old. We’ve been around for a while, it’s
a very mature organization and we’re very lucky to have the great support of
the community.

It’s a beautiful library we’re sitting here in the central
location now. It’s stunning. If you haven’t been here, you absolutely have to
visit. First of all Peter let’s talk about leadership. What brought you to
library leadership? It’s a big calling.

Answering that question will also answer the question
partly, about why this is a dream job for me. Going back to 1998, I’d been a
librarian at that point for about five years and I was working as the head of a
reference department at the Cape May County Library in New Jersey. I absolutely
did not perceive myself as a leader. I think like many librarians, I got into
the job to help people and was relatively shy, and didn’t think of myself as
someone who had leadership abilities. That had never come up in my life
previously. My director at the time Claudia Sumler said, There’s this Snowbird Leadership thing and I think I’d like to nominate
you to go.

I didn’t know what Snowbird Leadership was and I said, OK. So Claudia, and I believe the state
librarian, wrote some letters of recommendation and I wrote essays and did the
application package. I got accepted. I came to Snowbird right here in Utah, in
1998, that summer for a Residential Leadership Institute. It was about five or
six days and it was it was a life-changing experience.

It was the first time I even thought to myself about, not
just what I have to offer, but what is my responsibility to take what I have to
develop myself so that I can offer something back to, not just the community
that I serve as a librarian, but to the profession. Through that experience and
it was very much a lot of self-analysis and learning. We did Enneagram and
Myers-Briggs and those types of things. Really, it was experiential learning
where we were put in situations, oftentimes uncomfortable situations to see how
we behaved with other people in-group settings etc.

We really got to know where our leadership strengths were
and where our weaknesses were. The Salt Lake City Public Library was very
involved in that. So, Nancy Tessman, I got to know, Bobby Bowman and Anne
Menzies and a number of people who were very involved. The fact that the Salt
Lake City Library was very involved in the Snowbird Leadership Institute; I
formed some bonds with individual people but with this institution. It really
found a place in my heart. I came back in 2001. I’m looking over my shoulder. There’s
a picture of me and the Snowbird cohort from 2001 over your shoulder, there.

That was an opportunity. They called that the ‘recall.’ You
had to apply to come back, but it was more of a planning for the future of
Snowbird. So again, it was a way to reconnect, come back to Utah, spend another
few days here, and reconnect with the city library and with the Snowbird
experience. As I said, that was a life-changing experience for me. I feel a
debt of gratitude, as well as a strong bond of affection with this institution.
The fact that 20 years later I’m here and have the honor to help lead the
institution, I really do sometimes pinch myself.

What a great journey and so full circle, that’s really
amazing. As library leaders, as you say sometimes people are shy, they don’t
see themselves as leaders. How do we inspire vision and engagement from
followers as well as encourage them to push themselves into areas they might
not have previously considered?

Over the years I’ve tried to educate myself and develop
myself as much as I can around leadership and do presenting around that as
well. One of the things that I found is that in talking to people about
leadership people often have that experience, maybe especially in librarianship.
That, Oh, I’m not a leader. We think
we go right from leadership to being a leader, which are not necessarily the
same things. People sometimes think a leader is this binary thing, either you
are or you aren’t?

Peter Bromberg: [00:06:10] Also in our culture, there’s cultural
biases around who is a leader. If you word associated leader, there’s a bias
towards being male, there’s a bias towards – you think of generals…

You think of all the people who have positions of
organizational authority. Over the last so many years, I’ve really tried to
talk less about leadership and more about influence. This comes from some
coaching, training that I got through an IMLS grant. The idea that in any given
moment we all have choices that we can make, it doesn’t matter what our title
is or what office we’re in, or how much experience we have, if we’re just new
on the job, or we’ve been here for ten years. That each of us has a choice and
we can each think about what is our vision if everything was really how it
should be in our organization or in our personal life? What would that look
like? Then we can ask ourselves, what are some things I can do to move the
needle a little bit in that direction?

Sit down and ideate. Generate ideas, either alone or with
others, whether it’s personal or organizational that we’re talking about. Then
choose something and try it – get into action. If you think, Well, I really want this to happen to my
organization and here’s 10 things that might influence that. I’m going to try
this, I’m going to send an email to this person and set up a lunch to talk
about my idea. So, you get into action, then you reflect on what happened.

So, I tried that. Did it work, a little bit? Did it not
work? You have new data now that you can assess and say, Well it either worked or it didn’t. I’ll do more of it, or I’ll do less
of it, or I’ll try something else. We always have those choices and we can
always make the decision about what would the world look like if it was perfect
from my perspective? What is it within my realm of agency? What action can I
take to make that happen?

That’s about influence and that’s about personal choice. I
strongly believe that in any given moment each of us can make those decisions
and can get into action and try something, even if it’s small, to move the
world in the direction that we want it to move in. What I find is when we talk
about influence as opposed to leadership it’s a way of bypassing all the cultural
baggage, all of that. I’m not a leader;
it’s not my responsibility to be a leader. Really engage people in a way of
saying, but, you have options.

That’s fantastic. I love to hear that, and I know that
you’re doing a lot of very big initiatives here at Salt Lake City Public
Library, one of them being getting rid of fines altogether. So, not only
advocating for the people in your organization, but your whole community and
what they need. What’s that all about?

First and foremost, it’s very much just a values-based
decision, and it’s a reality-based decision. What do I mean by that? We have
core values as librarians about access to information, and access to service,
and equitable access as well. If you look at how fines play out, they create
these inequitable barriers of service. People who can least afford to pay for
fines are barred from using the library and I can give you a specific example,
but my staff off-cuff could give you 100 more anecdotes. People listening could
probably have them.

I was in a Lyft in Atlanta, back in January, whenever ALA
was last in Atlanta. I always do this thing when I’m in a cab or a Lyft, or an
Uber, and say, Oh, I’m in town for the
Library conference. Then just be silent to see what people say about
libraries. They say either, Oh, I love
the library, or oh, they still have
those things – I didn’t realize.

But, it’s interesting. My driver said, Oh, libraries. She said, I
grew up walking distance to this branch library of the Atlanta Fulton County. I
used to walk with my brothers and sisters, oh, we loved the library… She
went on, very typical, that nostalgia that we bring out in people. Then she
paused and she says, Yeah, I have three
kids but, I don’t let them use the library because I can’t afford it.Well, I said, how old are your kids? She said Seven,
11, and 15. So, why don’t you let
your kids use the library?

She said, Because of
those, she paused, because of those
deadlines that you have. She called them the deadlines. She said, It’s like having an extra credit card bill
that I can’t afford at the end of every month.

So, the variation on that anecdote you can hear again, in
every library across the country. Then if you look at libraries that have
gotten rid of fines what you often see is that not only does usage go up, and
card registrations go up, but they go up disproportionately in the poorer areas
that are being served.

People come back and say, I can use the library again. I looked at how much money we were
pulling in from fines and I looked at the research that other libraries have
done, and the experience of other libraries. I started having one-on-one
conversations with our board members and our council members. I was also going
into budget where I was most likely going to be asking for about a 25% budget
increase.

In those conversations about justifying our budget increase
usually at the end of the conversation I’d say, I just want to throw out this other thing. I really didn’t think it
was going to happen this year but I wanted to start planting seeds and getting
feedback from people. I was getting a positive response from the council
members, from the board members. As a bit of a surprise, at one of my
presentations to the board when I actually presented our budget – our council
chair said, Well if you want to do this
no fine thing I want you to do it now with this budget.

I ended up having to write up a recommendation. I was still
kind of in research mode and trying to workshop the messaging on it. I was
asked by the city council chair to fast track it. So, I did. I wrote up that
proposal and luckily, there’s been lots of great work that other libraries have
done. I want to give a shout out to Sarah Houghton who did some great work and
shared some of her research with me that was helpful. The state of Colorado has
done some great stuff, some white papers. By the way, I’ve been sharing and I’m
happy to share all the work that I’ve done as well, which is really
synthesizing and building on the work that came before me.

That’s great and so inspirational for so many of us who
would love to see those access barriers come down as much as possible. So,
fabulous. I bet you’re getting all kinds of, like you say, great stories from
staff about people coming back to the library.

Getting great stories. I spent last week… I tried to hit
as many service desks as I could here and I was out at some of the branches. I
would just chat with people, Say, so
what’s happening with fines?What are
you hearing from people? I really want to hear if there’s been negative
comments. Across the board, they were saying, No, no negative comments. People are happy. People are thrilled.
Staff are happy. They’re not having to – it’s saving them time. Someone said, Oh, I haven’t had to open the cash drawer
for two weeks.

We’ve only been in for a month but our statistics are
showing the number of borrowers are up, number of card registrations are up,
number of checkouts are up, which is reversing the trend from 2015 through
2016. If we’re doing a year look-back, all those trends were reversed now.
Which is what we expected to see based on the experience of other libraries. As
those statistics gather over the next few quarters and at the end of the year.
I’m happy also to share those out as well.

Can’t wait to see them. That’s outstanding Peter. Thank you.
Well, I know as well as during this impressive work in your community here you
advocate for libraries across the nation with every library. Can you tell me a
little bit about that?

Every library is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that was founded in
2012. We’re actually about to celebrate our five year anniversary beginning
next week. What we do, primarily, is help libraries advocate for themselves to
win at the ballot box. John Chrastka, who’s our Executive Director, former
Membership Director for ALA, from his position in ALA, saw that libraries
across the country were losing these elections and that there was, in any given
year, maybe a quarter of a billion dollars, $250,000,000 at stake at just local
zip code level elections. Libraries don’t necessarily know how to mount an
information-only campaign, don’t really know how to activate their friend’s
group or other support in the community to form a Get Out the Vote group, and really didn’t know the legalities.
Oftentimes libraries felt like well, We
can’t really do anything because we’re a public institution so we can’t
advocate. Libraries are losing these elections and it’s about twice as much
money as all federal money. As you know, LSTA was about 125,000,000 at the
time. Now it’s up to about 150.

So, libraries were losing this and John had the vision of no
one’s paying attention to this no one’s helping libraries win at the ballot
box. So, he formed EveryLibrary, that’s primarily what we do. We’ve done 63
campaigns to date. We have 46 wins. We’ve helped libraries raise over
$220,000,000 in stable tax money. We have seven more libraries on the ballot
this November, and everything we do is pro bono. We don’t charge the libraries
for our consulting and training services, in fact, we often seed them with
money. We’ll give them a few thousand dollars to buy yard signs or run a social
media campaign, etc.

Peter Bromberg: [00:16:07] Then, we work with their Get Out the Vote group too. With the
libraries, we train them on how to do an information-only campaign. You can’t
say, Vote yes. We teach them how to
say, Here’s plan A and Plan B. Plan A is
we win the money. You vote yes for us and this is what we’ll do with it. Plan B
is we don’t win it and this is what will happen if we don’t. We have to shut a
library branch, reduce hours, or we’ll do layoffs. It’s just information. It’s
not advocacy.

Then we work with the citizen groups to actually do the
voter canvassing, the yard signs, the knocking door to door, all the stuff that
goes with a typical campaign. We’ve been very successful in that regard and
we’re all donor-supported, I should mention. Go to everylibrary.org, and if the
spirit moves you. It’s individual donations. We average about $45, and we have
corporate donors as well. That’s how we’re able to go pro bono is through those
small and larger donations.

I can only imagine how much this means to those libraries
who may not have ever had to do anything like this before and suddenly had this
wealth of information and people to help them get through this process. I can
only imagine that’s just huge for them.

We’re also doing work with SafeSchool librarians. We put up
a website, safeschool librarians.org, really focusing in Florida, Washington,
Illinois and partnering with Follett on that. School libraries are under attack
across the country too. We do some other work; helping to save IMLS etc., but
the bread and butter is really working one on one with these libraries on their
campaigns.

Before we went on the air here I was saying I have to reset
my brain, it already feels like 10 hours of stuff has happened this morning.
We’re deep into our strategic planning, which we’re taking a little bit of a
different approach with it. It might be worth talking about a little bit. We’re
actually calling it a strategic roadmap, and I’m trying to deemphasize the
planning part and really emphasize more capacity building. We’re really trying
to use the methodologies and the philosophies of service design thinking. We’ve
hired Patrick Quattlebaum and Margaret Sullivan to be our facilitators of our
strategic planning process, of our road mapping process.

The idea for me is that a strategic plan, with a capital ‘P’
made more sense in a world that wasn’t changing as rapidly. If we go back 30
years and you ask, What was the purpose
of doing a strategic plan? Well, the idea is, we want to check out the
world, see what’s happening with our customers and with trends etc., look at
our mission and then come up with a plan. Maybe it’s a three-year plan or a
five-year plan, and here are these specific things that if we do these things
we will be successful.

I think in a world that didn’t change very much that
probably did correlate with success for an organization. We’re now living in a
world that is changing so rapidly. I’d like to quote Michael Edson, who was
previously the head of Strategy at the Smithsonian and is now at the U.N. He
saw this pace of change a few years ago and he said Things are about to get deeply weird. That was in 2012 and now we
can all experience, or sense in one way or another, things are getting deeply
weird.

My answer is not a 37 point strategic plan that we’re going
to execute over the next three or five years. What correlates with success is
to have an organization that is paying attention in a different way. That is
not just looking out at the world every three years or five years, but every
week. Who is our community today? What are their needs today? What are the
aspirations and challenges for our community as a whole today? Our community
partners, the organizations or government agencies, what are their goals? What
are their challenges? And, really paying attention to that in a much more
continual way, looking back at our core values.

My philosophy, I do the Venn Diagram in my head, that
overlap of our values and the needs of our community, becomes the ‘what’s most
important’ right now. To continually do that and respond to it in a way that’s
meaningful means that we need to be more adaptable both as an organization,
which means we need to look at our organizational structures, but also our
individual staff members – perhaps need to be less specialized and develop
those skill sets of adaptability and being more nimble. Increasing
communication, the more communication loops we have… I keep thinking about
organizational charts where people’s positions are in boxes and I started
thinking how we can’t have those boxes anymore. They need to be dotted lines
and then I start to think they really need to be clouds that are overlapping.
So, we have these cloud-like areas of responsibility that overlap with five
other peoples’.

We have to be able to flex across those boundaries, those
traditional boundaries. Our strategic roadmapping process is really about,
partly reaching out into the community, and we’re doing one on one in-depth
interviews with people across the community, as well as bringing in our
community partners and leaders of the organizations, to ask them explicitly
what are your goals? What are your challenges? What are your barriers? Where
might we be well positioned to help? And, really using that time to help those
organizations connect with each other so they’re answering that question with
each other, as well.

That’s part of it. The other part is building capacity
internally. We’re doing a lot of learning. Our staff, do you use service design
methodologies to do interviews, to understand the customer journey. To
understand larger outcomes, like the idea that someone’s not coming here for a
book, they’re coming here for a resume book, and they’re not coming here for
resume book, they’re coming because they want a job. They don’t want a job;
they want to be able to put food on the table for their family.

What are the journeys behind the journeys, understanding
that larger context? One of my goals is to, over this year and continuing on to
build that capacity organizationally for us to use that service design thinking
skill set to understand what’s happening in the world, what the needs are in
our community, and then be able to flex and execute an experiment, prototype
and learn very quickly about how we can meaningfully address those issues.

Yeah, you too, great when it’s all pulled together. I love
that cloud concept with almost circling back to how we started out talking
giving people different influence. If your clouds are intermingled with other peoples’,
that gives everyone a lot more influence and ability to adapt and change.
That’s really exciting. In closing, perhaps you’d share something that means
the most to you about libraries or library leadership?

It’s like one of those questions that’s simple and
challenging at the same time. …means the most. I’ll just say, as part of our
strategic roadmap process we surveyed staff and we asked them to identify their
personal values and a personal value statement, and then our shared
organizational values, and some shared organizational value statements. I read
through recently and cross-posted for the whole staff like 170 or so responses
to that question. In reading through the consistency of people who are
attracted to librarianship because they want to make a difference in other
people’s lives, that calling of – we only have so many years on Earth, we don’t
know how many years that’s going to be.

And, what are we going to do with our time while we’re here?
My personal answer to that question has always been to use my time to enrich my
life and the lives of others. That’s why I get up out of bed in the morning.
Personally, I have a mindfulness meditation practice that I’ve been doing for
years and so it’s a very intentional setting in the morning of an intention of
how I want to move through the world today, what impact I want to have – asking
for, perhaps, some guidance. That my time here and these interactions that
we’re having right here now are used to, not just benefit myself, but to be
enriching for all. When I look through the comments from staff, it’s just
variations on that theme, sometimes very explicitly.

The people who are here in my library, and I believe in
libraries across the country, are here because we do want to make a difference.
Because, we believe in the potential of all human beings and we want to use our
time to help other people maximize that potential to create meaningful
connections to learn, to grow and ultimately to create a better world for
ourselves, our families, our communities.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard it better stated. It’s so
true. I think that’s how so many of us in libraries feel and why we get out of
bed, like you say. Well, Peter, thank you so much for being with us today on
Library Leadership Podcast. It’s been great to talk to you. Thank you for your
leadership and for all that you do.

Why We Burned Our First Leadership Book, or How to Develop a Leadership Path that Holds Personal Meaning

Presenter: Adriane Herrick Jaurez

Co-Presenter : Becca Lael – Park City Library

Utah Library Association Conference

Thursday, May 16, 1:30-2:20pm

Mountain America Expo Center

How can we develop a leadership path that holds personal meaning? Inspired by interviews from the Library Leadership Podcast, a variety of strategic insights will show us how everyone can improve their leadership to personally shape their workplace, the community they serve, and the trajectory of the library profession. Attendees will learn how one library manager’s leadership path was transformed to include personal meaning, resulting in braver development.

Commencement Speaker for the Graduation of the Utah State Regional Master of Library Science ProgramFriday, January 5, 7:00pm Viridian Event Center I will be giving a commencement speech for the graduating class of Cohort 12.

Utah State History Conference
October 10th– 11th, 2017 Rio Grande Depot, 300 S. Rio Grande Street, Salt Lake City, UT Honoring the Past, Moving Into the Future: The Renovation of the Historic Park City Library that Developed a Dynamic 21st Century Library while Achieving National Historic Register Designation.

Nevada/Mountain Plains Library Association Joint ConferenceOctober 16th – 18th, 2017 Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, 50 US-50, Stateline, NV89449
Lightning-round presentation on how The Park City Library recently underwent a $9.6M library renovation that included the creation of a media lab that included a sound booth, green screen, film equipment, and other high tech amenities to foster independent media production in a ‘film-centric’ mountain town that is accessible to everyone, not just movie producers.